Knit One, Purl A Dozen...

It started, as so many of these things do, with a costume.

i dont evven knoww wwhat youre talking about thats not my pail 

The costume in question - Eridan Ampora from Homestuck - was fairly simple compared to many of my projects and I'm thoroughly pleased with how he turned out. Even though I had to make a floor length purple velvet cloak, the most time consuming part of the costume was the scarf - especially since I had more or less never knitted before. It was thirteen alternating 10cm sections of plain knit in two colours, and - sometimes only getting an hour or two of knitting in each week due to university obligations - took me around three months.

The pink, yellow and orange at the back are mine - shipped all the way to Japan at Christmas

My mother is a knitter - socks are her particular favourite, after felted slippers - and she'd been trying to get me into it for a while. I honestly wasn't all that interested! I am firmly in favour of stockings - the longer, finer, and tighter fitting the better, and thanks to my oddly shaped feet, punishing shoe preferences and general clumsyness I wear through them extremely quickly. Producing a pair of socks I would actually want to wear would take an obscene amount of time and skill, and then I would ruin them in the space of a day or two.

 Interesting, accessible patterns for anything else were hard to find. Anyone who's seen my sewing will know that I also find it very hard to stick to patterns! It was a toss up between a lot of old lady frumpiness (Knitted doilies! Egg cosies!) or faux-trendy 'crafter chic' which is all rather useless (Apple and banana cosies!). I hadn't learnt how to purl yet, and wasn't at all sure I could actually cast on on my own.

But probably because I had been knitting this scarf for so very long, my older brother got me this for my birthday;

I still haven't taken the obi off this book,
and neither have I taken the time to figure out what people call an obi outside of Japan

I have to admit I was a little bit horrified - what if it was full of socks, egg cosies and knitted place mats? - but this is actually a very sweet book with a very interesting range of patterns. There is a whole range of things, all presented to look very appealing, achievable, and inter-spaced with handy information and the odd titbit. One sock pattern even comes with a wine list. There is an emphasis on knitting for fun, so many of the scarf patterns seem to contain the instruction 'repeat pattern until you have used all of yarn A' and gauges etcetera are approximate. But there is also an excellent variety of patterns, rather than shapes (cables, ribs, chevrons, waves, brioche...) and it gets surprisingly technical at times. This is the perfect antidote to a flaw I've found in 'crafter chic', where many of the patterns just turn out to be stocking stitch in an unusual material or quirky shape.

The siren-like appeal of lace Habu wraps aside, I decided to set my sights on something achievable to begin with

The finished product, beautifully modelled by Alfred

I used Brocket's washbag pattern with a slightly larger needle size (It didn't make sense to me to buy a pair of 3.75mm needles when my other projects - and the wool - requested a pair of 4mm, and it seemed to work fine) and Cygnet Silcaress DK in Dove, with stripes of same in Thistle. I love purple and grey together! The ribbon is stash sourced, leftover from a last-minute Christmas party ensemble - coincidentally, that was also purple and grey (and copper) - purple ribbons and a fluffy, cable knit jumper. This seems appropriate somehow.

The first ten rows, modelled by Percival

I went shopping for all this yarn in one go, and nearly decided not to bother with the quirky little shop down a side street that I occasionally find the most delicious things in. I was glad I did! I stumbled across this beautiful Portuguese Rosarios 4 Bio Bamboo in the most stunning pink (Officially, it's colour 11) - and in the sale! I had a pattern from the book in mind - the buttercup and mustardseed fluted rib scarves - but both of which were done in chunkier wools with chunkier needles.

I started this morning. I'm knitting to the buttercup pattern (they're actually identical except for the end sizes, and the mustardseed is one repeat narrower) which will still give me rather a thin scarf in this gauge, but I'm quite happy with that. I think the pattern would be clearer if I was a little more consistent with the tension and didn't keep losing count when doing the repeats, but it's already starting to form the characteristic waves.

King Cole Bamboo Cotton for the sea glass chevron scarf,
modelled by Randolph

Even though it's a bit of a stretch for my abilities, the sea glass chevron scarf immediately caught my attention. It's a beautiful ribbed scarf with flowing chevron stripes. The yarn I liked only came in 100g balls - very annoying when you're supposed to have 10g of six different colours - so I went with a base and three contrasts instead of six. All four yarns are King Cole Bamboo Cotton - 50% bamboo, 50% cotton! I'm a great fan of bamboo, one of the most versatile plants on the planet (Except for hemp, possibly the most versatile) and the soft, smooth texture of this kind of yarn is perfect for a scarf for me. I'm terribly fussy about fluffy things around my neck. The base colour is going to be the rich purple 524, with accents of white 530, mauve 528 and bright pink 536.

I was also very keen to try out some blanket patterns. I'm likely to be spending another winter at my parents and the house - particularly my room - gets very, very cold due to some intriguing thermostat shenanigans. I love the fat plaited bread cable blanket, and although I'm a poor and uneducated knitter I am passable at crochet, and the art deco blanket looked lovely (With a colour scheme tweak, of course)! However I quickly realised how obscenely expensive yarn is and just how much I would need to make up a blanket of any reasonable size - I might just be able to afford to do one of the smaller patterns in cheap acrylic, which rather defeats the point. My solution to this problem, however, is something I'll tackle in another blog.